CNBC TV18: Executive Vice Chairman of Cognizant India Attributes the Company’s Success to Investments Made Ahead of Curve

“There are a number of factors both internal and external,” says R. Chandrasekaran, explaining the company’s confident growth outlook. “If I look at the external factors, this is about a once-in-a-decade technology shift that creates lot of opportunities. Many of the customers are now trying to do better in their own businesses and driving business transformation leveraging technology.”

According to Chandrasekaran, the SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) stack of technologies is opening up a lot of opportunities for the company. “Now technology has become a part of the CEO-level agenda and newer technologies like the Internet of Things, 3D printing, machine reading, and machine-to-machine communications are helping to create digital businesses,” he says. “Internally, we have been tracking these trends and making investments ahead of the curve. We saw a phenomenal performance in 2013 because we had the early mover advantage. That drove a lot of discretionary spend toward us and that resulted in a $250 million over-performance in 2013. We expect that to continue in 2014 as well.”

Commenting further on the company’s guidance, Chandrasekaran says, “We don’t see any significant change in the demand either in a particular industry segment or in a particular geography. We expect the overall trend to continue in 2014 as well. We don’t see any significant shift in the overall pricing. It has been very stable and whatever growth we have reported is all by volume.”